Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

A long time ago I posted on Richard Statman‘s dissertation work on the geometrical complexity of proofs: take a proof in natural deduction, interpret the formulas in it as nodes of a graph with edges going from premise to conclusion of an inference and from assumption to the (conclusion of the) inference where it is…

The BBC 4 radio program “In Our Time,” presented by Melvyn Bragg, has archives of previous features on a range of topics, including some relevant to logic. Haven’t had the time to listen to them, but it you do, let me know what you think. Might be the kind of thing you can tell your…

Exciting developments! The Association of Symbolic Logic has made the now-out of print volumes in the Lecture Notes in Logic (vols. 1-12) and Perspectives in Mathematical Logic (vols. 1-12) open-access through Project Euclid. This includes classics like Shoenfield’s Recursion Theory, Lindström’s Aspects of Incompleteness in the LNL, Sacks’ Higher Recursion Theory, Hájek and Pudlák’s Metamathematics…

Catarina Dutilh Novaes’ list of women in philosophical logic and philosophy of logic (see this earlier post) is now online. Updates over there, please!

For your amusement: a list of all countries with at least 5 members of the Association for Symbolic Logic, rank-ordered by number of logicians per 10,000,000 inhabitants. Bonus info: percentage of women logicians in these countries. Country # ASL members % Women per 10,000,000 New Zealand 17 0% 39.5 Switzerland 25 4% 32.5 Israel 22…

Catarina Dutilh Novaes sent the following important message to PHILOS-L last weekend, reposted here with her permission: Dear all, Recently (and admittedly very late!), I started thinking more seriously about the lack of gender balance in the areas in which I do most of my research, namely history and philosophy of logic and philosophical logic.…

Call for PapersPM@100: Logic from 1910 to 1927 21 – 24 May, 2010Bertrand Russell Research CentreMcMaster UniversityHamilton, OntarioCanada The Bertrand Russell Research Centre in 2010 will host a conference to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the publication of the first volume of Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica. The publication in 1910 of the first of…

My website people changed something on the server and now this blog isn’t displaying properly and my website is completely down. Sorry. If you want to get to my website, try www.ucalgary.ca/rzach/ instead of www.ucalgary.ca/~rzach/

Benson Mates, Professor emeritus of Philosophy at the University of California, died May 14. He was a logician, historian of logic, philosopher of language,epistemologist, Leibniz scholar, and author of the excellent logic textbook Elementary Logic.

In between thinking and lecturing about the epsilon-calculus, I’m in Paris for a few days: it’s where all the Carnap action is right now. Heard wonderful talks by the likes of Steve Awodey, Dan Isaacson, Alan Richardson, Erich Reck, Delphine Chapuis-Schmitz, and Tom Uebel, unfortunately missed those by Michael Beaney, Juliet Floyd, and Rick Creath,…